I’ve just begun to add some gamification into mQuiz and our mobile learning application. We’ve been thinking quite a lot about badging for the mobile learning modules and perhaps how we could apply this to quizzes too. However, for me, awarding badges for just completing a single quiz, seems to cheapen somehow the value of the badges. So I’ve decided to try out a dual approach of points and badges and see how that works. You gain points for creating/taking quizzes and for completing activities in the mobile learning app, but you only gain a badge for completing all the activities in a given module (or perhaps creating a certain number of quizzes).

So far I’ve only implemented the basic points scoring system (I’ve retrospectively added points to those who have previously been using mQuiz), and the scores only appear on the leaderboard on the homepage, but shouldn’t be too much work to get this more integrated (for example showing your score in the mobile app etc).

For those interested, the scoring currently works like this:

100 – creating an account

200 – creating a quiz

20 – first time you attempt (someone else’s) quiz

? – percentage score you got for a quiz on your first attempt. E.g. if you score 75% on your first attempt you get 75 points

50 – bonus if you get 100% on your first attempt at a quiz

10 – each subsequent attempt at a quiz (max. once per day per quiz)

5 – someone attempting a quiz you created (max. once per day per quiz per user)

10 – completing an activity in the mobile learning app (max. once per day per activity)

I’ve tried to encourage people to try and get as high a score as possible on their first attempt, although you are rewarded for trying the quiz repeatedly (on different days), and I also wanted to encourage people to create popular quizzes – hence the points when someone attempts a quiz you created.

I’m not sure I’ve got all the points quite right yet, so will see how this works and I may make some adjustments over time. I’m sure there are a few ways to cheat this (I’ve thought of a few already), especially with the API to create quizzes.

Next steps are to get the points, leaderboards etc displaying in the mobile app…